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a novice's question
- To: XSL-List at mulberrytech dot com
- Subject: a novice's question
- From: "anilia bruho" <musoryanin at hotmail dot com>
- Date: Tue, 01 Aug 2000 02:04:17 GMT
- Reply-To: xsl-list at mulberrytech dot com
Here's a novice's question:
From reading the XSL spec I got the idea that XSLT has a fairly complete set
of programming features (conditions, loops, etc.) but is not concerned with
any visual formatting issues. Now, that's logical. But on the other end of
the rope there's XSL FO which offers a good inventory of formatting
parameters, but has no programming abilities at all. This seems much less
logical to me.
I'm a designer and I must say that visual formatting involves a lot of
algorithmic elements - comparisons, calsulations, selections among
alternatives, etc. Just one example: in a recent project I needed to format
all the headings (in a huge document) in such a way that, first, a width
measurement of the heading's text set in a certain font is taken, and
second, depending on whether this width exceeds some specified constant, one
of two formatting models for this heading is selected, with different
indents, linebreaks, etc. In a static XSL FO description, these two heading
models would be represented by sugnificantly different sub-trees.
Now, the above described problem cannot be solved in a XSLT stylesheet
because XSLT has no idea of fonts and widths. And on the other hand, in XSL
FO, I cannot express it either because there's no way there to program the
necessary choice algorithm. Finally I was able to solve this problem
satisfactorily using TeX, which allows to mix "control flow" and visual
statements (although TeX is a nightmare in many other respects).
So, what XSL experts would say? Am I missing something? Or am I, with my
designer needs, out of luck in XSL world?
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